So what’s the next big innovation going to be?

Now that I’ve got my iPhone 6 and whilst it is lovely and it is growing on me, it is largely just more of the same in technology terms. So it makes me wonder where the next really big innovation will come from, not just for music making, but in mobile tech as well, in general.

In fact, if I think about it, the last really big step forward was the iPad and what that did for mobile music, but since then there hasn’t been anything on the same scale. Certainly not in my opinion anyway.

Of course you might argue that the next big innovation could be with the Apple Watch, although I know lots of people don’t see it yet really. I still like the idea of a smart watch, but perhaps I’m wrong. We’ll just have to see where that goes and how adoption works for both users and developers

The other area where you could argue that innovation could come from is Android. I know that to date Android hasn’t been seen as anywhere near iOS in terms of mobile innovation, but with Samsung’s latest SDK for Pro Audio it could catch up very fast indeed, especially if there is good develop support for it. But even so, this is likely to be a catch up more than anything rather than a different course for innovation in mobile music tech.

So could it be in software (apps)? Well I think that it is quite possible here. In the iOS world, and in fact in Android as well, we’ve largely seen a replication of the desktop into mobile. That’s not a bad thing though, or at least it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We’ve got great synths, drum machines, controllers and DAWs. There’s just about everything you could wish for in the mobile world, but if we simply recreate desktop systems in mobile aren’t we forgetting something? Aren’t we loosing out on all of the benefits of a device that is meant to be moving around with us? That in itself is probably a whole discussion for another day though. However, in terms of what I’m interested in here, I wonder if we’ll see some major new step forward in mobile innovation via an app or a way that an app is able to utilise the device or device data.

So what do you think will be the next major innovation will be, and I suppose as importantly, where will it come from? I’m really intrigued to hear your thoughts on this.